Battle Over Math in New Jersey Drives Off a New Schools Chief

By WINNIE HU

Published: June 14, 2007

Parents, some involved in a campaign against the math teaching in the highly regarded Ridgewood, N.J., school district, were to have met the new superintendent at a reception last Monday night.

But the reception was abruptly canceled, leaving the school board president to explain that the superintendent, scheduled to begin on July 1 after a nine-month search costing more than $20,000, had backed out, largely because of the escalating math fight.

In a statement expressing disappointment, the five-member school board said the recruit, Martin Brooks, had been made to feel unwelcome by ''anonymous phone calls, e-mail messages, blogs and Web postings by some community members'' that ''questioned his integrity, ethics and educational philosophy.''

''You have to question how much further they'd be willing to go to advance their cause,'' Mark Bombace, the school board president, said in an interview. ''And that is very disturbing to someone who has spent his life trying to do the right thing for children.''

Dr. Brooks, a superintendent on Long Island, is the latest casualty in the math wars, felled by parents who complain that their children have failed to learn basic skills in one of the top-performing school districts in New Jersey. After consulting math professors and hiring private tutors, the parents flooded the Internet -- and the local newspaper, The Ridgewood News -- with concerns about what is known as reform math, collecting more than 175 signatures on a petition calling for an overhaul of math instruction in six of the district's nine schools.

These schools -- four elementary schools and the district's only two middle schools -- use reform math, an approach that typically allows students to explore their own solutions to problems, writing and drawing pictures, and to use tools like the calculator while they learn mathematical methods and skills. Reform math grew out of an effort to instill in students a deeper understanding of what they are doing rather than memorizing facts and repeating answers.

But parents like Linda Moran, a former math teacher, say the approach has left their children lacking. Mrs. Moran said she became upset last year when one daughter, 10 at the time, had no idea how much she was owed after shoveling snow for an hour and 15 minutes, at $7.50 per hour, and the other, at 13, asked for a calculator option on her cellphone to figure out restaurant tips.

''She had started to view herself as a non-math person, and I was not going to allow that,'' said Mrs. Moran, who, along with her husband, an engineer, now spends seven hours a week tutoring three of their four children in math.

Reform math has been used for more than a decade in schools nationwide, including some public schools in New York City and its suburbs, but some have moved away from it recently amid concern that it leaves students with a shaky grasp of the basics. The opposition accelerated after a September 2006 report by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the nation's leading group of math teachers, that recommended a tighter focus on basic math skills and narrower state standards.

In Ridgewood, about 25 miles northwest of Midtown Manhattan, the math debate has created an unusual level of friction in a 5,600-student district where the excellence of the schools is taken for granted. The district's test scores are consistently among the highest in New Jersey. Ninety-four to 100 percent of the fourth graders in each Ridgewood elementary school passed the state math test in 2006, compared with 82.3 percent across the state.

The parents who oppose reform math say it is confusing, moves too slowly and allows students to get by without mastering basic skills, partly because they can rely on calculators. ''It's like math for English majors,'' said Frances Edwards, a public relations consultant. ''It was never equations. It was patterns, drawing circles, writing down numbers and explaining what you did.''

Reform math has been used in Ridgewood elementary schools since at least 2000. School officials say it spread largely because teachers embraced it. The approach was introduced in the middle schools this year. School officials said it is often supplemented with more traditional instruction.

''I believe that 80 percent of the parents in this community feel comfortable with the math instructional program in kindergarten through eighth grade,'' said Paul Arilotta, who has served as interim superintendent for the past year. (The school board is meeting on Monday to decide what to do in Dr. Brooks's absence.)

But Dr. Arilotta said the dispute had dampened teacher morale and taken up time. In response to the concerns, he said he planned to hire an independent consultant this month to convene groups of parents and teachers and start a dialogue on the issue. ''We're trying to move this to a problem-solving process rather than having a fight or a battle,'' he said.

Joseph G. Rosenstein, a math professor at Rutgers University who supports reform math, said that it is often the more educated parents who grow angry and frustrated at the approach because they do not understand it. ''They want their children's education to resemble their education because they are successful,'' he explained. ''They say, 'It worked for me, why won't it work for them?' ''